ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytic conception of psychic development places unconscious phantasy at the core and origin of all mental activity. Within unconscious phantasy,
unconscious emotions are experienced as re-enactments: they are not available to the conscious mind as a thought, but rather lived through as a concrete objectrelationship, a kind of dramatic scene. Although unconscious phantasy is especially active in babies and young children, for whom other forms of thinking are just developing, it is also operative in adults, buried within their unconscious mind and harbouring those unprocessed emotions that have been repressed. Repressed emotions are experienced as concrete objects, or beta-elements, which through projective identification give rise to feelings of unconscious emotional identification in which there is no distinction between self and other. They are at the basis of repetition-compulsion, a psychic mechanism which results in compelling re-enactments; these can manifest themselves in everyday life, including as psychiatric symptoms, such as was the case for the Rat Man’s obsessions or Anna O.’s hydrophobia. Overcoming repetition-compulsion is possible if the repressed emotions which underpin it are subjected to an alpha-function, a reflective process which gives them meaning and thus brings them into the psychic sphere of the conscious mind, where they contribute to the formation of the self and the development of the personality.
